Greatness at the Met

When a Metropolitan Opera audience booed “Tosca” in September, the episode made headlines, with gleeful reports showing up in media outlets that usually ignore opera. Last night, Leoš Janáček’s prison drama “From the House of the Dead” opened at the Met, and it met a rather different fate: there was prolonged, frenzied applause for Peter Mattei, Kurt Streit, and the rest of the cast; for Esa-Pekka Salonen, the conductor; and, not least, for Patrice Chéreau, the director. Will this turn of events inspire the same lavish media coverage? Not bloody likely! But word of the triumph should get out all the same. Setting aside operatic routine, the Met has put together an essentially flawless production of a hugely powerful work. My review will appear in The New Yorker a week from Monday. There’s a useful discussion of Janáček, Dostoevsky, Chéreau, and other matters at the Times’sArtsBeat blog.

(Photograph: Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera.)

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.